Harry-anna Nears Pact Kelly Makes Suggestions To Get School Out Of Chaos

January 17, 1986|By Carolyn Cox of The Sentinel Staff

TAVARES — While details remain to be settled, it appears that legislators and the state education department are near agreement on resolving the financial and organizational troubles besetting the Harry-Anna School in Umatilla.

The school, housed at the Florida Elks Children's Hospital, was hit in October with a rule interpretation by the education department that school officials say has caused economic and organizational chaos.

At that time, the education department said the district could not use the state hospital-homebound funding program to pay for operations at the school. That program generates about 10 times as much money per student as do programs for regular classrooms.

State Rep. Everett Kelly, who has taken the lead in trying to help the school out of its difficulties, met this week with representatives of the education department and House Appropriations Committee and has come up with several proposals.

The school, which had taught its students in groups ranging from one to three, could not afford to hire enough teachers to do that, so it was forced to switch to a program called physically impaired. This program not only generates less money for the district but requires that students receive twice as much instruction time as they were getting under the hospital-homebound program.

''One of the approaches is to have the state pick up part of the tab,'' Kelly said Wednesday. ''All of them involve some state funding and shifting of funds.''

While Kelly and Education Commissioner Ralph Turlington say there is little question the school will be helped, there is no way the school district can expect much relief for the current school year.

The proposals being discussed in Tallahassee, when narrowed to a definite course, will have to be approved by the Legislature. At the same time, the education department is proposing other rule changes to help Harry-Anna that will have to be advertised and eventually approved by the Cabinet.

Lake school district officials are projecting about a $20,000 loss in funding for the current school year, which the district plans to absorb.

While the dollar loss may not appear significant, the impact of the October rule interpretation has caused havoc at Harry-Anna, said Principal Tim Hatfield.

The education department said the district could no longer qualify for that program unless each child at the hospital received one-on-one instruction from the faculty.

The result of the rules interpretation has been a crunching of classes, with one teacher trying to serve up to 15 children at a time in order to give each child 25 hours a week of instruction. It also has resulted in a collision of schedules with the hospital staff. Children often are pulled out of class to receive therapy.

Hatfield, his teachers and school district administrators say the quality of instruction has been greatly diminished because of the changes.

''We're not talking about funds, we're talking about quality of services,'' Rich Donohue, director of exceptional student education for the school district, said Thursday.

Donohue said he is encouraged by the developments in Tallahassee.

''They're certainly exploring it realistically and looking for alternatives and advice and suggestions from us,'' he said.

Though Kelly declined to discuss specifics of the funding plans, other sources said the school probably would have to stick with its current funding program. However, the state would pay most of the costs of restoring the Harry-Anna teaching program to what it was before the rule interpretation and maintaining it that way.

Turlington defended the rule interpretation, which other education department officials say was necessary to stop the erosion of the hospital- homebound funding program because some districts were abusing it. However, he conceded that it had caused an unintended negative effect on the Harry-Anna School.

''There was no question we needed to make a rule change as far as allocations for homebound students,'' he said. ''But Harry-Anna is different in some respects. A high proportion of its students are multidistrict. Naturally, we couldn't expect Lake County to absorb all of that when many of the students are from outside their district.''